


Exit Wounds

by Fudgyokra



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: AKA unrequited BruJay and brief DickKori, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Friends, Coping, Cute Ending, Emotional Baggage, Family Drama, Family Issues, First Kiss, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Healing, Healing Sex, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Kinda, M/M, Mild Smut, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, Pseudo-Incest, Some Humor, Surprise Ending, Taboo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 04:55:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14229723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fudgyokra/pseuds/Fudgyokra
Summary: After a traumatic run-in with Slade, Dick returns to Wayne Manor to find peace. Instead, he finds Jason Todd.





	Exit Wounds

**Author's Note:**

> Since I really enjoy exploring the fucked-up relationship between Dick, Jay, and Bruce, have more angst in the same vein as “Ghosts in the Mansion Walls.” Happy ending, though!
> 
> Warning: This contains mentions (no graphic depictions) of rape and also touches on Jason and Dick’s potential relationship as adopted brothers. It’s complicated but also not.
> 
> While I Wrote:  
> Red Stars – The Birthday Massacre  
> Cold Fame – Band of Skulls*  
> Follow – Breaking Benjamin*  
> Zombie – Bad Wolves  
> Leave a Scar – Marilyn Manson  
> If You Could Only See – Tonic*  
> Ape Dos Mil – Glassjaw  
> Young and Menace – Fall Out Boy*  
> Sound of Winter – Bush*  
> I Could Have Lied – Red Hot Chili Peppers

_I think that God is gonna have to kill me twice._

* * *

Gotham is ice-cold and soaked in rain when he reaches the outskirts. Before the city limits sign there had only been a drizzle and some wind chill, making the transition that much starker. He guns his motorcycle down the first and last empty road he knows he’ll see and tries to decide which is more depressing: the black and brown patches of icy sludge he passes on his way into the heart, or the smoggy, featureless blanket that this city calls a sky.

The buildings he passes are only blurs he can barely make out through the pollution and sheet of rain alike, but he knows these streets better than he knows his own head, so it doesn’t really make a difference to him. It shouldn’t feel like he’s breathing fresher air than he has in a long time, but it’s the fact he’s breathing at all after last night that makes it feel like this. He knows. Gotham knows.

He thinks it’s a little pathetic how badly he wants to cry, but the rain mocks the sensation and that’s good enough, because he can’t show up on Bruce’s doorstep looking like he’d been through what he’d been through, or he would never get back to Blüdhaven unmonitored.

No, if he could help it, Bruce wouldn’t know a damned thing. As far as Dick’s concerned it’s just another wound and he’s got plenty of those already, so one more meant nothing, even if this one felt deeper than the rest.

He stalls the engine a few feet away from the front of Wayne Manor and lowers his kickstand. While he’s sitting there, already soaked to the skin and disregarding any further rainfall, he briefly debates the idea of turning right back around and leaving. It had been a long trip, but maybe the trip was all he needed. Maybe this was just to remind himself that he could return whenever he wanted and not that he needed familiar, loving company more than he needed to breathe right now.

It’s one in the morning, so there’s a good chance Bruce is still out, seeking blind justice with blades in hand.

Dick sighs shakily and steps off the bike. He’s not going back, not tonight. He presses a finger into the doorbell and subconsciously sighs in a moment of reverie at the deep toll it makes, audible all the way from the bare bones of the mansion.

Alfred answers, and something in his face falls so fast that Dick knows it must be all over his own how something’s just not right. He ignores the fact he’s practically dripping icicles and gathers the man into a tight hug, which is returned with a kind of gentleness he doesn’t want right now. Hesitantly, he pushes Alfred back and looks at him with dour eyes.

“Can I come in?” he asks.

“Of course you may, Master Richard,” Alfred says as he steps aside to let him do just that. He makes a brief, mother-hen kind of fuss at the pool of water Dick has dredged up the steps and onto the otherwise pristine wood of the foyer floor, then disappears momentarily to fetch him a towel. What Dick’s offered is a ridiculous thing: It’s huge, fluffy and black, with a script “W” embroidered in white stitch toward the bottom. He doesn’t recognize it, so he guesses it came from Bruce’s private bath and doesn’t think to ask why Alfred would go through the trouble of grabbing this specific one.

He steers the now-damp Grayson into the kitchen and asks, with a familiar kind of formality (if there ever was such a thing), if he’d like something hot to drink. When he agrees, the man is bustling around to fix it for him, and, for the smallest sliver of a second, the comfort of home outweighs the night he’s had.

Then, like a broken record, the space of relief he might’ve allowed himself skips to an abrupt dawning. What happened strikes him like dry ice to the skin, and the force of it makes him curl in on himself just long enough to draw a shaky breath. When Alfred questions, he avoids it and slips out into the living area.

“Master Bruce isn’t home yet,” the man’s saying, but Dick is too preoccupied trying to discern whether it’s disassociation or rainy cold that’s turning his fingertips numb to pay attention.

Then he notices, through the gold-trimmed glass of the back door, the watery shape of a man sitting by himself on the deck, hunched over his knees, cigarette smoke billowing out around him.

Dick doesn’t really think, just pulls the door open and makes Jason jump nearly a foot off the porch before he twists to look at him. “ _Christ_ ,” he spits. “Knock, would you? It’s not a fucking barn.”

He doesn’t think when he laughs, either, but he does until his sides hurt and his eyes are watering. Alfred lifts a concerned hand to his elbow for only a second, then decidedly breaks away and leaves them be.

Dick steps onto the deck, shuts the door, and sits down beside the other man. Despite his earlier outburst, Jason is relaxed again and doesn’t seem intent on questioning why he’s here, at least not yet, so Dick enjoys the silence and absorbs more of the chilly air through the ridiculous towel he still has wrapped around his shoulders.

Jason stretches his legs in front of him, makes a pleased groaning sound low in his throat, and then leans back on his hands. While the smoke from the last centimeters of his filter curls upward and fluffs out into the hollow of the awning above, Dick just watches him. He waits for something. Anything, really.

It takes until the rest of the cigarette is gone, but Jason delivers. “So, Dickie-bird, what’s got you lurking around these parts?”

“I missed home,” he answers. It’s at least part of the truth.

And then Jason does something he’s never done before, to Dick’s knowledge, and tips his carton toward him in an inviting gesture. When he accepts and holds his hand out for the lighter, the other’s expression changes into one of calm acknowledgment. It’s too practiced, like he recognizes this exact kind of hurt. Dick, dumbly, looks from his face to his legs, sweeps his gaze down to his feet and stares blankly. Really, he doesn’t doubt there could be a shred of truth in that.

To his surprise, the errant gaze is what gets Jason to reassemble his face. He draws his legs closer to his chest and furrows his brow, passes him the lighter and says, with honest concern this time, “What’s going on, man?”

“Nothing,” he lies.

“You don’t smoke.” He’s got him pinned, there.

“Bad night,” Dick clarifies.

Or, at least, he thinks that’s what he does until Jason scoffs and says, “Yeah, no shit. I mean what happened?”

There’s the pleasant white noise of the downpour in the background and the regal black awning shielding him from the worst of it, but beyond that there’s nothing. Then, Jason scoots closer and puts a gloved hand on his shoulder, and there’s _warmth_.

Dick crumbles. “Slade happened,” he whispers. Jason’s eyes flicker back and forth between Dick’s until something turns them dark.

“Slade,” he repeats. There’s no tone to his voice at all. He scoots back to his original position and looks out over the garden while Dick smokes beside him. He’s choking with every other breath and Jason’s not even laughing at him, so he makes the mistake of thinking he’d understood.

A crack of thunder sounds somewhere in the distance. Jason faces him again. “Who was it?”

There’s a curling sensation in his gut before he answers and when he does, he’s not sure he’s going to get it all out before he pukes. Still, even though every word is a struggle, he manages. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that he’s killed friends before,” Jason says, and Dick swallows thickly at the misinterpretation. “Who was it?”

“No,” is all he says.

“No?”

In lieu of a reply, he hands the barely-burned filter back to Jason, who accepts it and wraps his lips around where Dick’s just were, and he just watches numbly while he tries to tamp down the nerves rising in his throat. He doesn’t even realize he’s being strange until he’s being looked at like he was an especially tough puzzle.

“Dick,” Jason says carefully, “what did he do?”

It takes four painful seconds of recalling the hideout, dim and chilled, with flashes of Slade’s fingers being jammed in his mouth before Jason’s staring with a kind of bloodlust in his eyes that could only mean he really does understand this time.

“I went to him first,” Dick admits. He isn’t sure when his voice had become so hushed. “It got out of control.”

The silence is heavier than the rain, but it breaks fast. “Are you okay?”

It was the worst thing Jason could have asked, but Dick doesn’t fault him for that. Instead, he refocuses his attention on trying not to cry and moans more than speaks his answer. “No, Jay. He—it _hurt_. For one stupid minute I trusted him and he—I reached out, I expected…I don’t know what.” Caught between furious and disparaging, he finds he doesn’t know what to do with his hands while he talks, so he just throws them out in front of him in exasperation.

Jason isn’t looking him in the eye anymore.

Dick doesn’t know why he keeps talking. The lid had come off, he supposes, so now the steam is escaping. Words come with terminal velocity and a burning heat he can’t contain. “I thought we knew each other front and back, but I was wrong. I’m a desperate fucking idiot for thinking he would be careful, that he’d _stop_ when I said no—” And that’s all he manages before his voice cracks. The sound of it drives a knife into an already gaping cut, and that’s what finally brings the tears.

He’s mortified to be crying, especially in front of someone else, but Jason’s expression doesn’t change. He finds himself being yanked into a hug for the second time today, but at least this one isn’t pityingly careful. In fact, it gives off an entirely different vibe: one he can’t put a finger on until Jason says, in a deathly serious voice, “I’ll kill him.”

Dick knows this isn’t an exaggeration, but he can’t accept that kind of action, not when he knows how Bruce would react. Still, he doesn’t object—can’t find his voice to do so—and instead curls his fingers as tightly as he can into the leather of Jason’s jacket.

They’re sitting like that when he does what he knows he shouldn’t and leans in close, flicks his gaze from Jason’s mouth to his eyes, then back again. It probably shocks himself more than it does Jason, even if the latter’s breathing is suddenly shakier than before. At first, his hands are frozen over Dick’s shoulders, but within seconds they warmed up enough to cup either side of his jaw and draw him closer, and _that_ surprises him more than his own actions.

Now that the intent is too clear to flee from, he makes himself stop thinking and acts on the impulse. There’s a second of lag while his brain catches up with the fact their lips are touching, then he’s kissing him and Jason’s actually kissing him _back._

When they break apart, Jason is wearing a strange look. Dick is certain his own face is unreservedly confused, like that of a lost child even though he’s nearing thirty and knows he has no business falling apart in front of another grown man.

The sudden surge of panic with which he’s struck prompts him to shoot to his feet. “Oh, god, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have—” He lifts a trembling hand to his forehead, dropping the towel on the porch at his feet in the process.

“It’s, uh. It’s fine,” Jason says with a hollow laugh. “Sit back down, idiot.”

Though the sensibility of that choice evades him, Dick obeys with only a mite of hesitance.

There’s a terribly awkward pause before Jason’s next words, but it isn’t like things get better when he speaks them. He doesn’t look any more relaxed than Dick feels. “Was that, like, a preexisting thing?” he asks with a weird inflection, which registers as discomfort. It’s an alien sound from such a typically steady voice, and it makes Dick want to shake his head at the ludicrousness of it as if that would clear all of this away. What had he _done?_

At length, he asks, “What do you mean?”

Jason has the gall to roll his eyes. “I mean, genius, have you ever thought you’d wanna kiss me like that before tonight?”

Dick closes his eyes, exhales through his nose, answers with the truth. “No. I’m really sorry. I don’t know why I did it.”

There’s some measure of surprise that strikes him when Jason tells him it’s fine and that he shouldn’t be sorry, but there’s far more that accompanies what he says afterward, which is, “I’m glad you did.”

They’ve reached a stalemate, because Dick can’t—or won’t—accept what that means, and Jason is either too stubborn or too embarrassed to explain. It takes a minute, but the latter finds that the answer to avoiding the conversation is to lean over and kiss Dick again, and there’s no hesitance in his movements now, nor is there any meeting him back.

The kiss is perhaps too warm, too frantic for what it should’ve been, but it’s the best thing Dick’s gotten all night and he doesn’t want to push his luck, so he stops first this time. It was a necessary choice, considering he’d all but crawled into Jason’s lap and Alfred is bound to come back any minute with tea. Life was enough of a nightmare without being run upon doing _that_.

When he stands, Jason does the same.

As sure as the sun rises, Alfred arrives soon after their return to the living room with a fancy-looking tray bearing three teacups: One for each of them even though Jason doesn’t drink tea and hadn’t asked for a cup to begin with. He takes it anyway, either because he needs a distraction or because he can’t turn down Alfred’s kindness. Possibly both.

The butler gets comfortable in his chair to drink his, and it’s the look on his face that tips Dick off to what he’s about to ask. Jason seems to notice too, because he cuts him off with some errant and ridiculous assertion, leaving Dick the perfect excuse to scamper away in avoidance of the prying. He can’t think of a proper excuse, but Alfred isn’t dumb and has had plenty of practice with Bruce to recognize the signs of a man trying to escape.

Dick and Bruce weren’t always the most similar, but they had that in common. Either of them could have been plausibly on his death bed and would still rather say nothing than be fussed over by Alfred, well-meaning though he was. He never meddled with I-told-you-so’s when it was something serious, yet they both always felt crushed by the weight of the paranoia telling them he secretly felt that way.

Dick doesn’t even ask where he ought to bunk for the night but simply picks a room and claims the bed by falling onto it in an exhausted heap. The room is warm and the blankets plush, and the nostalgic comfort is what triggers a reflex to break down again. He refuses to let it happen, though, mostly because he can hear the front door open, followed by Tim and Damian bickering almost instantly afterward.

He doesn’t move an inch. In the passing minutes, everything gets quiet again, and he thanks his lucky stars that Alfred and Jason cover for him, because he doesn’t think he can weather through small talk tonight.

He knows they’ve all seen the motorcycle out front, but Bruce will accept his late presence without question and the Robins are probably too wrapped up in their argument to bother seeking him out. For the first time, he’s glad they’re at each other’s throats. It saved him the pain of them being at his.

An hour passes before he thinks to brave the world outside his room, but right as he lifts his body from the mattress, the door creaks open. It’s only Jason, but he doesn’t know that that’s much better than any of the alternatives.

 _Great,_ he thinks; he's thrown their normal relationship away with one wrong move. The truth can’t be escaped, but it can’t be changed, either. What’s left in his list of options is acceptance, and he’s not sure he can manage that one.

“Hey,” Jason says. It amplifies the shame he feels by a hundred percent.

“Hey,” he says back.

“Err, I came by to check on you, I guess?” It comes out as a question because Jason isn’t comfortable playing the role of caretaker.

Dick ignores the lack of surety and makes himself smile. “I’m fine.”

Jason snorts. “You’re worse at accepting help than I am at giving it.” The words make things feel a little more normal. At least he can chuckle at that, and it slices the tension enough to where he can shut the door behind him and approach the bed upon which Dick sits.

Dick can’t tell if what happens next is something he fears or something he craves, but it renders the window of normalcy short-lived and installs in his guts a peculiar kind of pressure. Worse still, it’s horribly, horribly easy for him to grab Jason’s hand and pull him down into their third kiss. Number three is damning; it couldn’t have been passed off as a mistake like the first two, as it happens with premeditation on both parties’ ends.

There is cruelty in how _right_ it feels for Jason to topple down after him when he falls onto his back on the bed, but there’s far more in how his brain forms the haunting idea that it’s the weight and strength of him, like someone he knew before, making it so.

By the time he thinks it, it doesn’t matter, because Jason’s hands are travelling up his shirt and his own are tangled in Jason’s hair. It feels too good to stop, like something is propelling him forward against his better judgement.

But then Jason pulls away and says, with a faltering voice, “Wait, wait. I can’t do this.”

Dick blinks once, twice. “I—oh.”

“It’s just…this isn’t about you the way it should be.”

Dick understands that. He does, but he still plays dumb because, after all, the devil’s in the details and details are something he lacks. “What do you mean?”

In spite of how terrible everything about this is, it manages to get worse when Jason mutters only one word. Even worse, the word is a name. “ _Bruce._ ”

Dick inhales sharply, searches Jason’s face for any sign he’s making this up. Perhaps it’s just to gauge whether his own assumption of the name is wrong.

It isn’t.

He can tell when Jason ducks his head and squeezes his eyes closed against the monster that plagues him. The guilt’s nearly unbearable, and Dick feels the same way about Slade. That’s the rationale he uses to explain how he let it get this far, and how he lets it go even further with one assuring hand on Jason’s forearm.

Their eyes meet, and there’s a kind of understanding between them that almost hurts, how awful and truthful and naked it is. But that doesn’t matter, at least not right now, because Jason accepts him as he is and Dick does the same. Even though this is only half a plan and a shoddy one at that, they find themselves together under the covers, losing clothing article by article until they’re pressed skin-to-skin, kissing hard enough to bruise.

That’s where it all rolls to a halt for a second time. It’s almost as if they’re on the same wavelength, because the instant Dick is silently overcome by the memory of Slade’s hands once being where Jason’s are, Jason stops dead in his tracks, flops onto his back, and pulls Dick protectively against his side.

Neither of them say a word.

Jason’s snoring within the hour, not that Dick can understand how. He spends most of the night lying awake, thinking about how perfectly comfortable he is in this taboo, intimate embrace with his head on Jason’s chest and his arm slung around his midsection. It scares him a little.

It takes far too long to fall asleep, but the fact that he can sleep at all is a miracle in and of itself.

* * *

  _I woke up in my shoes again but somewhere you exist._

* * *

He wakes feeling hunted, like some phantom person on the edges of his nightmare could reach out and touch him if he even so much as blinked. So, for now, he sits in rigid stillness amid tangled sheets with his eyes wide open, staring at the dresser across the room.

Jason’s still out cold beside him, which ignites a spark of jealousy somewhere in his chest. It does little more than fizzle and pop, though, and he’s able to sink back onto the bed after several minutes of regulating his breathing.

He watches the other’s sleeping face long enough to wake him—the feeling of being watched is enough to do that to someone like them, Dick knows that, but he can’t gather any semblance of guilt at having roused him. Luckily, Jason doesn’t seem too pissed about it. He mumbles something Dick doesn’t catch, paws first at the covers and then at Dick’s waist, and eventually succeeds in dragging both closer to him so that the two of them are situated under the duvet, practically one silhouette.

Dick doesn’t dare breathe. Just as it had before, a recollection of his run-in with Slade seizes him in a grip of panic, but this time it’s all a confused jumble in his head thanks to the heat of the body beside him. He doesn’t know how he _should_ feel, but he knows he certainly shouldn’t feel like doing what he wants to, which is finish what they started only a couple hours before. What he does feel is _disgusting_ , but there’s too much wrong with what he’s thinking to even begin guessing which part is making him feel so awful.

“What’s wrong?” Jason warbles.

“Um,” is what he gets out, in little more than a panting breath against Jason’s chest.

This seems to drag the man into full alertness, because he props himself up on one elbow and regards Dick with concern. The look melts into something else after many slow, calculating seconds. “ _Oh._ Oh, shit,” Jason says, and Dick is hit with a sense of anxiety at his words, like he’d done something terribly wrong.

But, no, Jason is the one who looks guilty. He curses again, flings his legs over the edge of the bed and makes like he’s about to stand before Dick stops him by grabbing his wrist.

“I’m a fucking moron,” he gripes, but allows Dick to stop his progress in rising, nonetheless. “I shouldn’t have let it get this far.”

Dick couldn’t make himself disagree, but he knows it’s his own fault, too. “It’s not like I don’t— _didn’t_ want to.”

Jason catches the fumble, twists around to look at him with something in his eyes that’s clearly hurting him. Like before, Dick recognizes it.

He doesn’t know how they keep ending up with their faces so close, with their hands pulling each other closer as if that could somehow solve all their problems.

“I should feel like some kind of freak,” Jason whispers to him. “The way I feel about Bruce isn’t natural.”

“Says who?” Dick returns at the same hushed volume. “At least you didn’t pursue it. I did.”

“It’s not the same th—” Jason starts, before Dick shuts him up with a kiss.

“This is, isn’t it?” he asks, even though he already knows the answer.

Jason is cautious when he trails his fingers along the warm flesh of Dick’s inner thigh. Dick ignores the wrongness he knows he should feel and moves the hand with his own, over the couple of necessary inches it takes to get those fingers to wrap around his cock.

He sighs, and it’s the last bit of breath he manages to eke out before Jason swallows the rest of it in another harsh kiss. He gets him down onto his back again, and he’s straddling his thighs as he works him to full hardness.

They don’t stop this time. Dick finds, with only a single pang of sickly guilt, that he doesn’t want to.

“This isn’t going to make things better,” Jason says unnecessarily.

“Mm,” Dick replies, just before he wraps a hand around the back of the man’s neck and uses what little leverage he has to lift his mouth to his shoulder and bite.

Jason hisses, but he dips his head down to Dick’s chest and returns the favor, and now Dick can feel that Jason’s hard too, because it’s pressed up against him, leaving no room for argument.

“Hey, Dickie?” Jason asks. His tone is prideful and snarky, something so profoundly Jason, that Dick has to ask what the matter was. “Just thought I’d mention that this,” he says, lifting himself onto his shins to stretch toward the bedside table, “is my room.”

Dick isn’t sure what possesses him to bark out a laugh, but he does. He apologizes for stealing the room, but he doesn’t mean it and Jason can tell. It’s especially obvious when the latter pulls the drawer open and waves a travel-sized bottle of lubricant like it’s a treasure and grins, shark-like, down at him. All that does is make him laugh again, but he makes himself quieter this time, at least.

“You sure you don’t just have one of those stashed in every bedroom?” Dick jokes.

Now Jason’s the one laughing, and for one blessed moment, Dick feels everything else fade away: The pain, the anger, the sadness. Right now, it’s just them, and Jason’s still wearing that stupid smile as he dangles the bottle above Dick’s head.

He tries not to think about how they’ve been in this position before as kids, only in the memory they’re wrestling and what Jason holds is Dick’s mask, lorded victoriously over him while he’s got Dick pinned to the floor. He hates himself for recalling this now, but he knows that’s the least of his problems. He hates himself for far more than just the memory.

Jason doesn’t look nearly so remorseful. He does, however, seem concerned with Dick’s expression, which he hadn’t noticed had morphed into something odd. “We don’t have to do this,” he says, and Dick smiles fondly at the misread.

“It’s not that,” he clarifies, just before he swipes the bottle from Jason’s hands and tackles him onto his back.

Jason looks decently surprised by the switch but then grins up at him, anyway. Dick thinks, with some humor, it’d take being shot to stop Jason from grinning like he owns the world.

Carefully, Dick sits back and uncaps the bottle. He’s pouring what he hopes is a fair amount into his palm when Jason sits up and pushes gently on his chest to urge him to move backward. Dutifully, he does so, and he’s so absorbed in watching Jason spread his legs and loop his arms around Dick’s neck that he doesn’t notice he’s dribbling lube all over the sheets until Jason snatches the bottle back and laughs right in his face.

“Okay, you’re buying me a new one,” he says.

“Yeah, all right,” Dick agrees a little nervously.

Jason catches the tone and gives him a peck in assurance. “Listen, there are ways to make this weirder than it is, and I’d really love it if you tried not to do that.”

Dick snorts. “Got it.”

It’s all fun and games until Jason’s flat on his back again and Dick is nestled comfortably between his amply-muscles thighs, looking down at him. The gaze they share is scarily intimate, and it lasts just a moment too long. Eventually, Jason swallows hard and says in a funny voice, “That’s one of the ways.”

Dick laughs once, breathlessly, but it contains no humor. He murmurs an absent, “Yeah,” and curls his dry hand around him, just to touch. He’s not so much trying to jerk him off as he is just trailing his hand up and down the length of him, and Jason’s obviously trying not to make eye contact until Dick ponies up the courage to slide his lube-slicked fingers down to where he supposes they should be.

Jason’s breath hitches a little, but he makes himself hold Dick’s stare while he gets one finger in and just watches his face as he moves it.

“You don’t have to freak out,” he says with a short inhalation to steady his voice.

“Sorry,” Dick says, and tries actually stroking the length in his left hand. He lifts the palm of his right to meet Jason’s body and does little more than feel him for a second. Strangely, it’s when he leans down to kiss him that seems to fry all of Jason’s circuits, because when they part, he’s staring up at him with wide eyes that look almost frightened.

Not of him, Dick can tell, but of himself. He knows because it’s the same way he looked going to Slade, ready to ask him for things he should’ve known Slade couldn’t provide. Carefulness, consideration, love.

He pushes the thought away, presses in a second finger and waits for Jason’s go-ahead to let it sink all the way in to join the first.

“Now you have to—you have to kind of…” Jason clears his throat and makes a vague motion with his hand.

Dick doesn’t know how Jason gathers that it’s his first time doing this to another man, but he’s glad he doesn’t have to admit it. All he knows comes from Slade, and that’s not a good place to start.

Jason seems to get it, at any rate. The tenderness he exhibits with his next kiss cuts Dick down to the bone. “You’re fine. I’m not him.”

“No,” Dick says, “you’re not.”

They spend so long with the preparations that it’s more of an abstract hour to Dick now than an actual time. It doesn’t bother him at all; in fact, it makes him feel a little better with what he’s about to do. He knows he shouldn’t look at it like it’s a crime, but his thoughts keep flickering back to Slade to torment him, back to the night that was only so many hours out of reach.

“He was my first,” he admits with a grimace. “At least…you know, that way.”

Jason grits his teeth so hard Dick swears he hears something crack, but, then again, maybe he’s just imagining it. “I’ll kill him,” he reassures. Just like the first time, Dick can’t seem to remember to urge him not to. “I’ll cut every one of his filthy fucking fingers off, one at a time.”

Dick takes a shaky breath, withdraws his hand and flattens both palms against the bed. “Are you sure about this?”

Jason looks at him like he might be crazy, and it all falls into place from there.

He can feel heat and muscle opening around him, and Jason grunts in a way that makes him a little nervous, but he doesn’t seem overly uncomfortable and so Dick keeps going, so slowly he fears he might explode at any moment. Patience wasn’t one of his strong suits.

To his surprise, Jason laughs and says, “You can go faster than that, Dick.”

He’s honestly not sure he can, if he’s even capable of it, but he makes the effort as well as he can.

“ _Fuck,_ ” a voice says, and it takes Dick a solid three seconds to realize it was his own. He jerks his hips and watches the last inch of his length disappear inside the man, and then they’re flush and he suddenly wants nothing more than to start moving.

“See, now you’re just being a potty-mouth,” Jason tries to joke, but his cheeks are pink up to his ears and he looks far from his usual snarky and threatening self, lying on his back with his lips parted and his eyes half-lidded.

Dick’s laugh comes out a little strangled. “Sorry.”

“Think about who you’re apologizing to.”

He laughs again: a wheezy, pathetic little thing. “God, I, uh—”

“Move, Grayson.”

 _Right._ He tries to pull out a little at a time so that pushing back in wasn’t as much of a hassle for Jason to deal with, but then the man tilts his chin up, grunts from somewhere in the back of his throat, and makes a face that turns Dick’s first instinct into the one he follows, which is a hard snap of the hips that draws a similarly filthy curse from Jason like the one Dick found spilling from his lips just seconds prior.

When he stills, Jason actually laughs like he’s going manic and demands he move again. “If you keep doing this, I’m literally gonna die of blue balls.”

“At least that would be something interesting to put on your next tombstone,” Dick jokes.

This time when Jason laughs, it’s in a way that shows all his teeth, and his whole face is flushed and _Jesus,_ Dick wants to tear him apart. It’s a startling, almost frightening feeling, but it burns so obviously in the pit of his stomach that he knows he can’t ignore it or pass it off as something else.

Finally, he pulls out all the way and tries to roll his hips instead of jerking them, and this time Jason moans: Low, contented. Dick’s sure he makes the same noise, but he’s hardly aware of anything his own vocal chords produce because he’s so focused on Jason.

“You’re fine, man,” he goads, “I promise you can stop acting like I’m glass.”

He heeds the advice this time. It’s not polished but he’s at least done this before with women, so that isn’t the hard part. The difficulty lies in the fact that the face he’s looking down at belongs to someone he’s known since childhood. Even though Barbara falls into that category as well, this was somehow different. It wasn’t because Jason was a man, Dick knew that much, but he ignores the thought and starts moving the way his body’s begging him to.

Jason gets a firm grip on his hips and all but yanks him closer. It seems to please him when Dick leans down on his elbows and meets him in another kiss, and that distracts long enough for him to lock his legs behind Dick’s back and flip them over once more.

If he wasn’t as used to the maneuver he might have lost his breath, but that said nothing for his wide eyes when he realized he was looking _up_ at Jason now. “Christ,” the latter jokes, settling into a steady rhythm as he bounces up and down on his thighs. “Sorry for it, but next time you’re gonna have to show a little more initiative, Dickie-bird.”

_Next time._

Jason’s palms are flat against Dick’s chest, and next thing he knows there’s an awfully lewd slapping noise filling the room and Jason’s just laughing at his expression with a peculiar kind of twinkle in his eye. “I’m literally fucking myself right now, dude. A little help would be appreci—”

He’s cut off by an embarrassingly loud groan when Dick suddenly recollects all the pieces of his brain, digs his nails into Jason’s hips and pulls him down onto his upward thrust. “Like that?” he teases.

“ _Ohh_ —something like that.”

Neither of them seem to keep a firm awareness of what time it is, because when Dick finally cums, it’s more than an hour past when they started. Jason finished about three seconds behind, which is a surefire win in his book.

As expected, he manages a tired chuckle and says, with a mischievous grin, “That still counts as me outlasting you.”

And Dick, with a spitfire grin of equal caliber, runs his hands up Jason’s thighs and replies, “Sure, but you’re the one who just orgasmed from having someone cum inside you.”

In addition to shutting him up, Dick earns something he’s surprised to call a pout, so, overall, it’s a successful experience.

After a moment of recuperation, Jason climbs off him and rolls lazily onto his back. “God, is that sunlight?”

Dick looks first at the window, then at Jason, who’s now hanging halfway off the bed with his ass in the air, fishing for something on the ground below. “Uh, yeah,” he answers, reaching out to flick him on one cheek.

Jason offers a monotonous, “Ow,” and returns to the mattress with his cigarette carton in one hand and his lighter in the other. “Want a smoke?” he asks. Dick doesn’t realize he’s sitting there in weird silence, or that he’s smiling a little dreamily, until Jason looks at him with brows raised and says, “Earth to Dick?”

He hums, buries himself in the covers again, and drapes an arm across Jason’s lap. “Nah,” he answers at last. “I’m good.”

* * *

_Head straight, screwed on. Been screwed up for too long._

* * *

The first occurrence leads to another, which leads to another. Jason tends to stoke the fire first with the way he creeps into the room at night, always locking the door behind him and leaning against it with his cigarette half-gone despite the fact he’s not supposed to be smoking indoors. Like with many other things, following the rules isn’t a talent of his.

On one occasion, he greets him with a jokingly flirtatious, “Hey, babe.”

Of course, as the days pass and the confrontations become more and more common, it stops being a joke. Dick doesn’t know how or why, but they greet like old lovers, even in public places. It’s something as insidious as Dick’s arms around Jason’s waist, or the small pecks Jason presses to Dick’s cheek, and the fact that the motions will lead, at some point, to the inevitable: The two of them together on the bed, or in the coat closet, or sometimes in one of Bruce’s cars when they were feeling adventurous.

It never occurred to them that the ironic pet names were symptomatic of a much greater illness, because to them, nothing at all had changed. That’s what made it so dangerous, Dick supposes—that they didn’t even know what was going on until the ball was dropped in front of the worst possible person.

They’re both in the kitchen, one leaning against the counter and the other sitting at the island with Bruce. Alfred is busy cooking a breakfast he’s surprised anyone is actually present to eat, and everything is quiet for a while. _Normal_ for a while.

And then Dick asks Jason to pour him a cup of coffee, and Jason shoulders past Alfred and mumbles, casually, “Sure thing, baby.”

That’s all it takes.

Bruce looks up from the morning news plastered on his tablet screen with narrowed eyes. Alfred is still cooking, but every movement of his arm has become rigid.

Dick frantically looks between each of them with his mouth half open, ready to form any excuse he can ante up, but he’s a terrible liar and they all know it, which is why Jason supposes Bruce starts with him.

“Dick?” he asks, deceptively calm in tone.

“Um, yeah?” Dick returns.

Jason withdraws a mug and tries to keep going about the coffee business as if that will make what he’s just said disappear.

“Jason,” Bruce tries. It doesn’t escape him how the tone is significantly less calm this time.

Alfred mutters something to himself, pulls the pan of ham off the stove, and slips out of the room on the pretense of forgetting laundry in the wash.

“Bruce,” Jason says stiffly. “Good to see we’re all introduced.”

“This isn’t a game,” Bruce growls, and it’s then that the cheerful breakfasting mood officially flies out the window.

Jason’s natural impulse is to poke the bear, and it doesn’t change this time, either, despite what hangs in the balance. He spins around, empty mug in hand, and spits, “No, really? I assumed we were having a lovely family breakfast.”

“So did I,” Bruce says, and the deadly implication makes Jason’s fingers clench around the mug’s handle. His eyes are wild, so Dick stands and extends an arm in a gesture of peace-keeping.

“Hey, woah, there’s nothing going on,” he says, but that only makes Bruce angrier.

“Who said anything was going on?” He’s still glaring daggers at Jason, who glares right back.

“No one said there was something going on, _Dick_ ,” Jason hisses.

“I’m not stupid,” Bruce asserts. “Jason, if you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be doing…”

For whatever reason, Jason’s anger crumbles into something else. Not resignation, like Dick expects, but _fear._ “I—no,” he says. It’s visible to both Bruce and Dick that the coffee mug is shaking just the slightest bit in his hand. “Listen to me,” he pleads, but Bruce is having none of it.

“Is this what I let back into my home?” he says, standing from his stool and laying his palms flat against the countertop. “Someone who he thinks he can—he can what? Touch my eldest son and get away with it?”

Jason slams the mug down on the counter so hard it shatters, and when he looks back at the island, Bruce’s lips are a thin line.

“It’s not like that,” Dick lies.

Bruce says nothing, just stalks off in silence, presumably to fume in the cave, alone.

Jason and Dick are still standing there like twin statues when Tim and Damian blearily shuffle into the room. The former looks like he could use another few hours of sleep, but the latter is alert to the crackling in the air and asks, with a tone betraying his eavesdropping, “So…can someone explain what is the matter here?”

Tim cringes, and that’s when it becomes obvious they’d _both_ been listening.

Jason scoffs, drums his fingertips on the countertop for a second, and then pushes off to make a dramatic, steaming exit of his own. He elbows his way between Tim and Damian, and in his wake, there is the sound of the back door being opened and subsequently slammed shut.

Slowly, Tim moves to pour himself a cup of coffee. Damian reaches for a slice of ham straight from the pan, and the three of them have breakfast in tense, uncomfortable silence.

Dick wishes he had the willpower to leave the room, but it’s all he can do to just act normal, as if everything good he had during his healing process hadn’t just come to a grinding halt. All that’s left is to heal on his own, but that, he knows, is a difficult road to take.

* * *

_It’s all in your face, I see you break._

* * *

“Master Bruce?”

Bruce turns his head to regard his butler with as much false apathy as he can muster. He’s sitting at his computer desk with manila envelopes spread everywhere, one of them in his hands even though it’s clear he’s not studying it but ruminating on something else entirely.

Alfred approaches, examines the files closest to him, and hums in thought. “Why does this development bother you?” he asks, avoiding the necessary words and names it would take to lead Bruce to another busted fuse. It’s an art he’s perfected over the years, but it didn’t necessarily guarantee a one-hundred-percent success rate. This time it seems to work, because the question isn’t met with immediate vitriol but with a long, tired sigh.

“It isn’t right.”

“And why, pray tell, is it not?”

Bruce looks up at him like he’s trying to discern whether he’s joking. After a moment, he gauges that he isn’t and says, “Alfred, they’re…they’re supposed to be…”

Alfred’s brows lower with the resignation of what’s about to be said. He had known that this was going to be the answer, but it was the starting point of getting Bruce to really think about what was going on.

Finally, through a clenched jaw, the word comes: “ _Brothers_.” There’s a strange sort of silence, and then there’s another sigh on Bruce’s end. “Aren’t they?”

“Master Jason didn’t stay with us terribly long,” Alfred tries to reason, “and when he was here, Master Dick was not. Surely you don’t think they consider each other relatives?”

Bruce grunts, thunks an elbow down on the desk, and rests his head in his palm. “I don’t know. But you don’t understand. They’re both my sons.”

“Not from a purely legal standpoint,” Alfred puts in, and this finally ignites Bruce’s tired resignation into something else.

“Are you trying to defend what’s going on?” he snaps. “Did you know about this?”

“No, sir, but—”

“It’s wrong. You know that as much as I do.” Bruce swivels his chair so that he’s completely facing his computer, trying, in vain, to shut the other man from his social bubble.

Alfred, instead, sets down the folder in his hand and says with purpose, “I don’t think you know much of anything, Master Bruce. Half of the papers on this desk aren’t even the same subject matter as the other half, and I know for a fact they aren’t related cases.”

“No, you don’t,” Bruce mutters, but the way he says it only proves Alfred right. “Leave me be, Al. Please.”

There’s no movement for a few seconds, but eventually Alfred acquiesces and steps toward the elevator. “If you insist,” he says, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. “I’m only trying to help.”

“Yeah?” Bruce grunts. “Help _whom?_ ”

The question goes unanswered, because by the time he asks, the elevator doors have already closed, and Alfred is gone.

* * *

_What’s a kid like me even got to lose?_

* * *

Dick wants to joke about the coincidence that it’s raining again since it always seems to rain when something goes wrong in his life, but this time it’s not just _his_ life but someone else’s, and he doesn’t think Jason would find it as funny as he did. Instead, he sits beside him on the porch underneath the awning, just like they had when this began. He still thinks about being cheeky and doing what Jason had by asking if he was all right, even though it was supremely clear he was not, although that didn’t seem like a good idea, either. The right thing to say might not even exist, but that wasn’t going to stop him from talking and so he finally settles on a simple, “Hey.”

Jason doesn’t lift his head to look at him. “Hey,” he answers casually. He’s always been the better of the two of them at acting aloof and unhurt.

Dick crisscrosses his legs, gets right to the grit of the problem. “Did you ever consider me a brother?”

There’s a dramatically long sigh, and it terrifies Dick that it reminds him of Bruce.

“Which is worse, huh?” Jason asks. His tone is not one to be trifled with, but he does look at him, which is sort of an improvement. “That I never looked up to you that way…or that I _did?_ ” Dick’s silence leaves a lot to be desired, but his face is so open and earnest that Jason can only offer the truth. “No. No, I didn’t. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“I dunno,” Dick says. “Is it true?”

Jason’s face answers the question long before his voice does. “Yes, it’s true.”

“We never really spent time together.” It takes a minute to parse the coding, but Jason realizes it’s Dick’s way of saying he feels the same. He’s not sure whether that makes him feel any better, but right when he thinks he has the answer, Dick ruins it by saying, “I just want you to know I’m okay with all of this, despite what Bruce thinks.”

“Yeah?” Jason’s tone is sarcastic, biting. “Well, you don’t _live_ here. You don’t have to stick around Gotham fucking City and listen to him complain about it. _You_ don’t have to deal with the fact he’s damning you to hell every time your name pops into his stupid, batty head.”

Though Dick looks taken aback, Jason doesn’t retract anything he’s said. Contrarily, he twists to face him fully and continues with a dark look in his eyes, “You were always the favorite. The golden boy. Bruce loved you more. He still does.”

“Jason…”

He holds a hand up to stop him and scoffs, whether at the words or at his own thoughts, Dick doesn’t know. “I was always the second choice. Now, I’m not even that.”

“That isn’t what he thinks.”

“It isn’t?” Jason barks an unfriendly laugh and furrows his brows. “I’m not even _your_ first choice.” The look in his eyes only gets darker when he stands and puffs out his chest like he’s trying to prove a point that Dick doesn’t even get until he speaks again. “You know who you wanted first?”

Dick’s expression hardens. Slowly, he rises to his feet as well. “Jason, don’t.” The way he says it sounds like a dare, and he should have known Jason would take it instinctively.

“You wanted _Slade._ ”

It’s within the time it takes to draw a short breath that Dick punches him hard in the jaw, which does little more than make his head snap to the side for a second. Jason grunts, spits into the grass, and looks back at him with an ugly snarl. “It’s the truth. I was your rebound.”

No matter what he told himself, Dick couldn’t seem to make anything he said come out as less than a shout. “ _Rebound?_ You know what he did to me! What he took! You think you’re the guy I went to because he didn’t work out? Is that it?”

Jason gestures with his hands out to the sides. “Um, yes? Because you know what? That’s exactly what happened!”

“Fuck you!” Dick all but screams, and it’s enough for Tim to throw the door open and stomp out onto the deck with hands raised.

“Jesus, are you trying to shake paintings off the walls?” he snaps, shoving Jason’s chest first, then Dick’s. “Why don’t you two stop arguing and come inside?”

Dick almost wants to agree, but the sight of Damian’s face in the doorway makes him change his mind. At first, he doesn’t know why it stings worse than Bruce’s disdain or Tim’s dismissal of the bigger problem, but it does. It isn’t for another few seconds that he realizes it’s because the kid is _worried,_ and Damian doesn’t worry, not over anyone. Anyone but him.

He doesn’t want to put him through that. “All right,” he says, tone tight. “I was just leaving, anyway. Got a long trip back to Bludhaven.”

“Dick,” Tim pleads, “come on.”

“No, he’s right,” Jason interjects. “He should go.”

Damian sneers. “ _He_ should go? This is his home.”

“And it isn’t mine?” Jason snaps back.

Nobody says a thing after that. Jason shakes his head, takes a step backward, recalibrates. “Fine. You want me to go?”

“Don’t.” Dick wets his lips in thought, looks somewhere in the distance, then back at Jason with a smile that is wholly unkind. “You belong here with Bruce.”

The cut of those words makes Jason feel cold down to his core, and it’s then that he sees just how badly he’s ruined things.

“I’ll see you guys around,” Dick finishes, and with that, he makes his way through the house to the front door. He doesn’t slam it behind him or anything—even offers a polite goodbye to Alfred on the way out, and for some reason this makes Jason feel worse than if he had stormed off.

Tim is looking at him with concern, and Damian with anger, but that doesn’t surprise him and he doesn’t care to acknowledge either, anyway. They return to the living room in silence, just in time for Alfred to look back at them with his standard pitying eyes, and for Bruce to join the fray.

They all keep looking at him. He hates it even more than he hates himself right now and so he says, “It’s better that he leaves. None of you liked this, anyway. That’s what you guys want, right? For it all to go away so we can be a normal, happy family?” Here, he looks at Bruce, holding his stare for as long as he can stomach. And then he disappears down the hall without another word.

Now everyone is looking at Bruce, and it’s perfectly within his capability to take a hint, so he follows before any of them get the chance to say what he knows they’re all thinking.

Alfred looks between Tim and Damian, who are looking at each other. “Well,” he says conversationally, “I suppose I’ll try and finish breakfast.”

“Not hungry,” Tim says.

“I already ate all the ham,” Damian says.

Alfred sighs. “Oh, of course.” It’s been too many years of the same for him to even think about complaining further. They’ve got their reasons, so he turns on his heel and leaves to pick up the mess, which includes, to his annoyance, a shattered coffee mug with pieces flung all the way across the stovetop.

He can only hope Bruce has better luck with his own personal crisis, but he guesses that that’s only a pipe dream.

Then again, he’s been surprised before.

* * *

_I know my place, but it don’t know me._

* * *

There are two polite knocks on the door to Jason’s room, which leads him to make the first mistake of thinking it’s Alfred, and the even bigger one of opening the door to find Bruce standing there, looking torn apart.

Good, he thinks. He ought to be.

But deep down he knows he can’t blame him, so he steps aside to let the man in. “Whatever it is you’re gonna tell me, I’m sure I already know.” Instead of speaking, Bruce stands awkwardly in the corner while Jason takes a seat on the bed and lights a cigarette. He isn’t stopped. “Spit it out,” he adds for good measure. Still, Bruce doesn’t admonish, and that’s certainly strange.

“I wanted to apologize,” he says, and that’s even stranger.

Jason freezes, looks up at him with furrowed brows. “Come again?”

Bruce gives a longsuffering sigh. “Don’t be cute.”

“Can’t help it,” he deadpans. “I find that it makes other family members go wild, too.”

Bruce sucks in a breath, and when Jason looks at him he sees something in his eyes that’s not unlike heartbreak. It isn’t pleasant to look at, but he’s spent all these years dancing around this private monster and wasn’t planning on ignoring it any longer.

The guilt he feels invites grief as its companion, and the feelings churns in his stomach like a toxic concoction of agony he can’t seem to shake.

Neither of them speak for the longest time. It’s a personal failure, but eventually it stings so badly that Jason does have to look away. “This isn’t about you,” he says at last.

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

That makes him feel like he’s been punched in the gut. So, Bruce had known all this time about the way he felt? He thinks he might be sick, but swallows down the urge and inhales a lungful instead. When the smoke comes out, it breaks apart with his shaky exhalation. “I didn’t mean to hurt him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Then what?”

“The truth is, I don’t have a clue what to think.”

“Enlightening,” Jason mutters around the filter. “Any other brilliant advice?”

Despite the situation, Bruce manages half a smile. “If you’re looking for relationship advice, you’re in the wrong place.”

“Ha, ha.”

“I mean it,” he continues, serious again. “I…” A pause. Silent reconsideration. “I’m happy that you have each other.”

“We don’t. Or did you miss that part?”

Bruce presses two fingers to his temple and sits on the opposite edge of the bed, facing away from him. “Fights aren’t always the end of a relationship.”

“Except I accused him of approaching me as a rebound.”

“What?” Bruce looks back in time to see Jason’s shoulders go rigid. “All right,” he concedes as he turns back around. “I won’t ask. But…” This pause is so long that Jason thinks for a minute he’s not going to get any more, but that is exactly when he does. “To clarify, you did not go along with it for the same reason?”

He had.

Jason stubs his cigarette out on the bedcovers, and not even that draws a complaint. “Yell at me. Hit me. Do something, but not this.” He knows he sounds defeated, but for once in his life he just doesn’t care.

“I’m not trying to accuse you of anything, Jason. I just want you to talk to him.”

When no reply comes, Bruce stands and circles the bed to leave. He’s on the way out when he changes his mind, turns around, and claps a firm hand on Jason’s shoulder. “It would probably be best if you do it before he leaves town.”

When that clicks into place, Jason shoots to his feet and snatches his jacket off the bed. “Shit! Right!” he exclaims, just before he bolts for the front door of the manor and heads outside without bothering to pull it closed.

“You’re not going to take a car, Master Jason?” Alfred yells after him.

He unpacks his grapple gun and waves it in the air to make his point.

From the threshold, Alfred smiles. When Bruce joins his side, he’s given an appreciative pat on the back and an emphatic, “I’m proud of you.”

“For what?” Bruce asks.

“For trying.”

* * *

  _I chase the sun, it chases me._

* * *

Dick is a creature of habit, which is a fortunate fact for Jason, who finds him at the combination ice cream parlor and patisserie just inside the city limits. It was hardly a feat to hunt him down, considering the place was his favorite.

Relinquishing a subtle entry for something more his style, he pushes the frosted glass doors open with a flourish, steps purposefully inside, and ignores the looks from the other patrons as he stomps, soaking wet boots and all, straight to Dick’s table.

And yet, the moment those eyes are on him, the fire dims. All he can think of is how he wishes he’d never said a damn thing, because he’s faced now with the possibility that Dick might never forgive him, and, worse, that he’d deserve it.

To his surprise, though, Dick nods at the booth across from where he’s currently sitting and watches without comment as he slides in. “This an apology?” he asks, just before he begins stabbing at his blizzard with a straw like it suddenly turned unappetizing.

“How’d you guess?” Even though it is at its core a jest, it’s not delivered with much humor.

Dick’s eyes lift from the blizzard to Jason’s face. “Shot in the dark,” he deadpans.

“I’m sorry,” Jason says.

“You’re flooding the booth,” Dick says.

“I mean it.”

“I do too. Seriously, look at yourself. Whoever has to mop that up is going to be pissed.”

“Babe—”

“Let’s not do that,” Dick interjects with a terse smile. “It might look like we’re dating or something.”

“Right…wouldn’t wanna give people the wrong impression.”

Despite everything, Dick snorts a laugh. “I was actually just about to leave. I’m not really in the mood for the rest of this.”

“Oh,” Jason says. His first conjured attempt at stalling is a weak, “I’ll take it,” which he directs toward the blizzard cup, rather than to Dick’s face. He doesn’t really want it, either, but he swipes the dessert nonetheless and tries to make it look like he’s comfortable in the newly-rain-soaked booth, sipping on whatever the hell it is Dick paid to have sloshed into the gaudily-branded Styrofoam.

It doesn’t work. Dick tosses a few dollars on the table and heads for the door. “Better make the apology quick,” he says. With a groan, Jason follows him out front, and Dick adds, unnecessarily, “Got a long drive to make, you know.”

Jason pulls his lips off the straw with a pop, levels a stare at him, and watches his face go from tolerating of his presence to disbelieving. “That wasn’t really your apology back there, was it? Jesus. And here I thought—”

“It wasn’t,” he interrupts, tossing the drink in the trash from several feet away so he could reach out for Dick’s hand. He’s surprised he gets far enough to actually grab it, but it’s certainly welcome contact. Unlike his own, Dick’s hand is dry and warm. Before he can stop himself, he says, “How aren’t you as soaked as I am? It’s pouring out here.”

“I have a shield on the bike,” he answers, then quickly changes direction. When he talks this time, there’s a hard edge to his voice. “Are you gonna talk to me seriously or not?”

“Okay, okay.” Jason focuses his attention on the personal hell he’s created for himself and launches into the best apology he can manage when they’re two feet from the main entrance of a public place. “I know I fucked up. I shouldn’t have brought up Slade.”

Dick waits, searches his face again. “Shouldn’t have brought him up? I’m sorry, is he ‘the one who got away’? The ex-boyfriend who shall not be named?” He scoffs and clips on his helmet. “I should’ve known this was a waste of time.”

“Hold on just a—” Jason tries, but Dick makes a break for his motorcycle before he can finish the thought. Under his breath he mutters a curse, then jogs into the downpour after him.

Dick’s on the bike with the shield raised, leaving Jason standing out in the rain again with no cover whatsoever. Even still, he knows he’s on the losing end of this and has to say something—anything—to try and fix it. So, he stays put with his hands pressed against the shield’s front.

“You’re going to leave fingerprints,” Dick shouts over the rain.

“I love you,” Jason shouts back.

Dick blinks wide eyes, freezes with his hand on the clutch. He doesn’t say anything, so Jason seizes the chance he’s offered before Dick can decide he wants to run him over. “I know, fuck me and all that. I’m not trying to boohoo my way into getting you back. I was a fucking idiot to bring him up and we both know that. I’m still not entirely convinced I shouldn’t go hunt him down right now and slit his throat, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make, either.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what Bruce thinks, all right? I don’t need a blessing and I don’t need an excuse to want what I want. And I _want_ you. I tried to blame you for not wanting me first, like I had any right to do that. I’m sorry.”

They look at each other for a minute, and then Dick starts the engine.

Jason steps away from the machine with a crushed sigh. “Don’t wreck,” he tries to joke. “If you die on the way back, Bruce’ll find a way to blame me.” It’s meant to be funny, but there’s nothing that can make his ribs feel any less like they’re cracking apart with the pressure.

Except, that’s when Dick demands for him to get on the bike.

Whatever else Jason planned on saying is lost to short-circuiting in his brain, and so he switches gears. “Excuse me?”

“Get on,” Dick repeats. “Before I change my mind.”

Jason doesn’t waste time wondering what alternate universe he stepped into and follows the order, looping his arms around Dick’s waist even though he’s got plenty of gripping strength in his thighs to use. “Are you sure?”

“Not really,” Dick answers, but he’s revving the engine and backing out of the lot, so that doesn’t leave much room for argument. “You still got a safehouse on the outskirts, right?”

“Uh, yeah, but I haven’t set foot in that thing in—” The word “months” gets swallowed by the wind when Dick floors it, taking the machine to what had to be its top speed and whisking them out of the last old, dead street in Gotham.

The journey to the safehouse is only twenty minutes long, but it manages to feel like an hour thanks to the steady pitter-patter of rain on the shield and the familiar whirr of the engine lulling them out of time. It’s so disorienting, coupled with the barrage of thoughts going through his head, that Jason doesn’t even realize they’ve stopped in front of the place until Dick kicks his foot to startle him back to reality.

He gets off the bike, flips through his keyring, tries first one key and then another, continuing down the line until he finally gets it right.

As expected, the inside looks and feels completely unlived in, but it’s not as bad as he thought it was going to be. Hadn’t been robbed, for one thing, so that was as much a plus as it was a shock.

“We’re good,” he calls back, but when he turns he finds that Dick is only a few steps behind him, surveying the place with muted interest. “Welcome to Chateaux Todd, I guess.”

“One of many,” Dick says. He’s already wandered toward the hall, so that leaves Jason to shut the front door behind them.

“I guess so, but I’ve been staying with Bruce for a while now, so I don’t know that I’d really call any of these places _home_. They’re more like…”

“Bachelor pads?”

“Hangouts.” Jason wrinkles his nose. “‘Bachelor pad’ would imply that I stood a chance of ever getting laid again.”

“Fair point,” Dick says, and when he looks back at him he’s grinning, so Jason counts that as a victory.

“Seriously, though…” His tone makes the smile fall from the other’s face, but he anticipated as much. To busy himself while he talks, which he’s not good at to begin with, he pads into the kitchen and roots around in the pantry for something that might still be edible. “Err, you hungry?” he asks, before pulling out a box of spaghetti noodles and eyeballing them through the cellophane panel.

“Starving,” Dick answers. He sounds far away, like he’s mapping out the place.

“Pasta?”

“Sure.”

“I got canned sauce. It’s not exactly Alfred-quality.”

“Trust me, it’s better than cereal and ramen.”

“You don’t cook?” Jason snorts, pulls out a pot, fills it with tap water. “Man, whoever ends up married to you is gonna be thrilled.”

This time, Dick doesn’t laugh. Jason can hear his footsteps return to the living room, so he knows he heard, but he doesn’t dare push any more buttons and so remains quiet after that.

Luckily for him, or not, Dick has plenty to say. “Cooking pasta is hardly a talent,” is what he begins with. He plops down on the couch, fans away the little bit of dust that clouds in his face, and leans back with legs and arms crossed. “I hope whoever ends up married to you is blessed not to have all their taste buds.”

Jason bites back a retort; he deserves that one. “All right, touché.”

Dick is silent for as long as it takes Jason to cook the pasta and douse it with a not-especially-appetizing serving of canned tomato sauce, but when they sit down to eat, they both wolf it down anyway because neither of them had eaten and the need for sustenance tops out over pickiness.

By the time that’s done, there are no worthy distractions left.

They settle on the couch, each of them reserved to their own private sector located at each arm. Naturally, it’s Dick who speaks first. “Thank you for the food,” he offers.

“No problem,” Jason returns, more awkward than he’s heard himself sound in years. “So… You here to kick my ass, or what?”

“Or what,” Dick answers fluidly. He’s smiling at nothing in particular, and it gives Jason a funny thrill along his spine.

“You’re not gonna kill me, are you?”

“Jason, I’m not mad,” Dick says. Jason doesn’t buy it, and he guesses the look he levels him relays that information, because Dick sighs and scoots closer to him. “Look.” There’s nothing to _look_ at, but Jason’s not debating the semantics when Dick kisses him tenderly and pulls back to give him his best ‘told you so’ face. “See? Not mad.”

“You should be.”

“It’s not like what you said was factually incorrect.”

For some reason, that doesn’t sit well in Jason’s stomach. “Dick, don’t. Don’t say that.” Dick sits there, quietly, looking at him with brows raised expectantly, and Jason has to actually think about his words before he spits them out, which is harder than he thought it’d be because he’s got so many things he wants to say and they’re all competing to see who can slip through his teeth first. “You’re just saying that to make me feel like a giant ass.”

This time when Dick smiles, it’s a little shark-like. “You got me.”

Jason feels a weird laugh bubble in his throat but squashes it down. “I promise you, a bigger idiot who says stupider things does not exist on this plane of existence. I’m pretty sure I’ve been punched in the head too many times. Hal Jordan thinks I’m the biggest dumbass he’s ever met.”

By this point, Dick is laughing and it’s hard not to join along with such a contagious sound, but he tries to hold back for at least long enough to get the words out. “How was that? Am I hitting the mark?”

“I think so,” Dick agrees, slicking his hair back with one hand. Jason watches his bangs flop back into his face and tries not to smile like he’s ridiculously in love, which fails spectacularly. At least if Dick notices, he has the propriety not to mention it.

“Wait,” Jason says, holding a finger up for dramatic inflection, “I’ve got one more.” When Dick looks to him with expectance this time, it’s far more relaxed than before; he’s smiling, his eyes are bright, and Jason thinks literally dying all over again might be less painful than what he’s about to do.

“I’m listening,” Dick says after the too-long pause Jason leaves behind while he braces himself.

“I am such an idiot that...wait for it…” Jason smiles thinly, revels in the way Dick leans toward him the slightest bit while he still can, and then pulls away the instant there’s a knock at the door. “While you were scouting, I texted Bruce to come take you home. I told him everything.”

Dick’s face falls bit by bit, and seeing the slow going of it while he processes what Jason means hurts him just as badly as he thought it would.

“You told him…everything,” he parrots, watching dumbly with mouth ajar as Jason rises and lets Bruce in through the front door. Bruce was bad enough, but then Damian shoves his way inside afterward, looking for the life of him like he wants to throttle someone. Jason isn’t sure if it’s him or Slade, or both.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Damian demands, and the hug he launches on Dick’s still-sitting form startles just about everyone _but_ Dick, who’s so pale and still he looks not unlike a mannequin. “I’ll _gut_ him,” the boy hisses, and, yeah, Jason remembers feeling that way too. That was before he went and made a cock of himself, but he hopes this does right by the universe. Dick’s gonna hate him, but he supposes that’s all part of fixing the balance.

Bruce is as silent as ever, watching it happen. Jason leans over, whispers something to him, and then heads for the door.

While Damian’s still fussing and Dick is trying to work through the numbness to assure him that everything’s fine, Jason looks Bruce in the eye and nods once. When Bruce nods back, Jason slips away in silence, unnoticed by anyone else in the room.

* * *

_You'd know my heart if you knew your place._

* * *

“So, he did the sneaking out to get away from you?”

“Yeah. I guess he thought I’d be mad at him.”

“Were you not?”

“I mean, a little bit, sure, but I never wanted him to disappear like that.”

“And you cannot tell him this?”

“He never told anyone where he went.”

“Not even your Batman?”

“Not even him.”

“But you love him, yes?”

“It’s not as simple as that.”

“I think that is where you are wrong, Dick Grayson. You must find him and tell him or you will live your whole life regretting it. Until you are able to do that, you have me, and I hope that is enough.”

“Kori, it’s so much more than enough. I can always count on you.”

* * *

_Seems the road less traveled shows happiness unraveled._

* * *

As Dick had come to learn, life was never simple. It didn’t matter that he spent day in and day out trying to dredge up the courage to find Jason, because even if he wanted to, he knew it wouldn’t work out with the life he had. At least, that’s what he tells himself for the first year.

Between that and the constant detective work ushering him into too many breakdowns to be healthy, he’s surprised Kori waits as long as she does to leave him.

She isn’t even angry when the conversation finally happens, and that stings so much worse than it would have if she were. She just looks at him with big, sad eyes, takes his hands in hers, and tells him the last thing on the planet he wants to hear: “I know that you still want him back. You want to be _with_ him.”

“I want to be with you,” he says, but as much as that’s true, it’s not like the way he wants Jason, and that’s what is left of an argument he never really had to begin with.

* * *

_You got to take a little dirt to keep what you love._

* * *

It takes another year, but they eventually do find each other again. It’s nothing short of a miracle, and the most incredible thing about it is that he doesn’t have to find Jason, because Jason finds him.

There’s a knock on his door around noon, just in time to startle him awake from his midday nap. As expected, not a moment afterward the crying comes. With a heavy sigh, Dick fights his way out of his comfortable covers and does what has to be done.

When he pulls the door open, one-handed and weary, he’s sure for a long stretch of time that what he sees standing before him is a mirage—some leftover residue of a dream too good to be true.

But then Jason looks from his face to the toddler perched on his hip and says, with almost comically wide eyes, “Um…long time no see.”

Dick doesn’t answer. He stands there with lips parted like he intends to, but nothing comes out. Mar’i doesn’t let the silence exist peacefully for more than two seconds, however, before she begins wailing again, crabby from being awakened.

“Don’t—oh, don’t.” Dick steps aside and gestures for Jason to come in, which, after some hesitation, he does. He doesn’t do anything afterward except watch Dick pace back and forth, bouncing the little girl on his hip and rubbing soothing circles on her back until she finally quiets. “I’m sorry,” he breathes more than says, “she just laid down a little while ago. Well, we both did, but—”

“No, no, I’m sorry,” Jason says awkwardly. “I didn’t know you, uh…” He trails off, but the rest of the sentence doesn’t need to be spoken for Dick to get the idea.

“Yeah, she’s… Her name’s Mar’i.” He chuckles, but it comes out so dry and foreign that not even he would have fallen for it. “She just turned one a little while ago.”

“Cool,” is all Jason can muster on that front. “Should I go?”

“No!” Dick catches himself, clears his throat, sets Mar’i in her high chair. “No, you should stay. It’s no big deal, she’s just hungry. And, well, she doesn’t like being woken up.”

“Me neither, kid,” Jason says with a smile he hopes is convincing enough not to scare her into another fit. He’s not exactly the greatest with kids as much as he likes them; he always managed to make Lian cry no matter what he did, and eventually Roy stopped bringing her around altogether.

There’s nothing but silence for a painfully long time. Dick fixes his daughter her food, sits it down on the plastic tray table in front of her, and finally faces the man he’d thought for sure was permanently a ghost in his life.

Although his hope was that he would miraculously find the right words in some equally miraculous front of passion, he still does not speak. Neither of them do. It’s a stalemate until he gives in with what little is left of his sense of humor. “Great talk, Jason. Is that all you came for?”

“No, I…”

Mar’i cuts into the slow progression of the conversation by tipping her bowl of squash onto the linoleum floor with a clunk and a splat, earning the signature lethargic sigh of early fatherhood for her efforts. For whatever reason, Jason decides that now, while he was watching the other man clean the floor with a rag, was the time to speak. Sometimes even he can’t parse how his brain operates.

“I’ve been staying about a mile outside Jump City.”

Dick struggles with how to respond but eventually decides on the easiest path, which in this case was facing the problem head-on. “That’s great, Jason. I don’t mean to be a snot about it, but you just took off, you know? I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish here, but—”

“I’m not trying to—Ha, Kori would probably kill me, huh?”

It takes him a second to realize what Jason means by that. Instead of admitting the truth, he fakes a smile and says, “She looks just like her, doesn’t she?”

“Like a carbon copy,” Jason agrees. “Got your hair, though.”

“Which is probably the worst thing she could have inherited from me.” Dick laughs once, dryly.

Jason looks at the girl for a second with a soft smile, but eventually remembers where he is and why he’s there. “Um, hey, I just wanted to let you know that I’m sorry for ditching. And for hiding.”

“Yeah,” Dick mumbles. He’s fixing Mar’i another bowl—something sweet, something she’ll actually eat—and is losing hope by the second that this is actually going to get anywhere. Belatedly, he realizes he’d been hoping it _would_ go somewhere, even after all this time. It leaves him with a strange feeling in his stomach.

“Yeah,” Jason parrots. Evidently resigned, he gestures vaguely before stepping away to indicate his intent to leave. “It was nice to see you again. Tell Kori she’s…lucky.”

“Oh, yeah. Lucky. She loves my ramen recipe.”

Jason looks confused for all of three seconds before he recognizes the callback to their last conversation, but he can’t find it in himself to force a smile.

That’s when Dick finally springs the truth on him, preceded by a thin-lipped smile. “Jason. Kori and I divorced months ago.” Obviously, he hadn’t expected that, if his expression was anything to go by. “Don’t worry too much about it.” Dick says. He’s in the process of trying to convince Mar’i to use her spoon instead of her hands, but he ultimately fails and decidedly leaves her be. “At least we’re still friends.”

“What happened, man?”

Jason watches Dick’s expression turn tired for a wholly different reason, and it takes him longer than it should have to interpret what that meant. He mutters a soft, “Oh,” in the place of the other man’s explanation, but that doesn’t make his face look any less beaten down.

It takes even longer for him to summon the will to explain why he was here. Now, though, the truth hardly seemed to be important in the grand scheme of things. “Jeez, I came all this way to say something, but now it’s just gonna make me look like a huge asshole.”

“I think we’re way past that point, Jay,” Dick tells him, but at least the smile on his face is fond and actually reaches his eyes.

Jason scoffs to hide the stupidly relieved smile of his own. “Okay. Well, in that case, I guess I should spit it out.”

Dick cocks his head the slightest bit, and Jason would bet he doesn’t even know he’s doing it but it makes him look just a little like a puppy. It’s downright adorable and he has to reroute his thoughts to get back on track before he says something dumber than what he already has queued.

The space of wordlessness he leaves is enough for Dick to lift a brow and say, as an annoyingly handsome smirk slides across his face, “If this is your idea of spitting it out, you’re doing a terrible job.”

“I missed you,” he admits. “And I missed Gotham, as crazy as that sounds.”

“It’s not crazy.” Dick transfers Mar’i’s disastrous mess of a tray table to the nearby counter and wets a new, clean washcloth in the sink so he can wipe her face. While he’s squatting there, rinsing smudges of sweet potato that extend all the way from her hairline to the front of her Superman shirt, the girl only giggles like giving her dad a hard time is the funniest thing in the world. In the limited worldview of a toddler, perhaps this was true. Once he’s done, he gets to his feet. “As a matter of fact,” he says, extending his previous thought, “I think Gotham missed you, too.”

“It’s not Gotham I’m worried about,” Jason replies. It comes naturally, like he isn’t terrified of how Dick’s going to react. What he’s going to think.

But Dick delivers an easy smile as he lifts Mar’i out of her chair and sets her down on the carpet at his feet, where she simply refuses to stay. Jason watches, with some measure of surprise, as she floats straight back up and makes insistent grabby hands at his hair.

Dick laughs, corrals her into a hug, and lets her climb onto his shoulders to sit. She’s still messing with his hair when he finally looks back at Jason. “Okay, you got me. I missed you, too.”

“You’re not mad?” Jason asks, to test the waters.

“Oh, I’m mad.” A sigh, a sideways grin, an eyeroll so dramatic it rivals even Alfred’s, and then: “But I think it’s something we can work out.”

“‘We,’ huh? As in, the two of us? Together?” Jason thinks his own grin might split his face right in half if it gets any bigger.

“As long as you’re not planning on running off again, like an idiot.”

“I’m not _planning_ on it…”

“Jay...”

“Okay, okay.” Jason steps toward him, hesitates only a second, then slips an arm around his waist. His face is serious when he brings it closer to Dick’s, and he sincerely hopes Mar’i doesn’t kick him in the teeth in the following seconds, because that would kind of ruin the mood. “I promise I won’t leave again. I may be stupid, but not stupid enough to fuck up a second chance from someone who has every right not to give me one.”

“Language,” Dick chides without fire. He’s looking up at him like he expects something, and Jason’s not always great at taking hints but he _gets_ this one, so he leans down and kisses him square on the mouth. He soaks up every little sensation like he needs this to live because he has _missed_ it and, Christ, it’s been a long time, but he hasn’t forgotten how much he loves the way Dick’s lips feel against his.

Abruptly, Mar’i smacks him on the top of the head and yells, at top volume, “No! Only I kiss daddy!” Then, to make her point, she floats between them and puckers her lips dramatically.

Jason rubs his head while Dick laughs, swipes her into his arms and peppers her face with kisses until she’s all but squealing with delight.

“Isn’t she the cutest?” he says after they’re done playing. He lets her down again, and this time she accepts the carpet at her feet and toddles off.

“She hits weirdly hard,” Jason comments.

“She is her mother’s daughter.”

They stand there until the girl is out of sight and Jason deems it safe to gather Dick in his arms again. “Well, obviously she is,” he starts. “She doesn’t hit like a wimp.”

Presently, Dick punches him in the arm and smirks at the brief contortion of pain in his features. “I was kidding!” he defends. It earns a heartfelt laugh, followed by Dick curling a hand around the back of his neck to pull him down into another kiss.

And this one tastes just a little more like _hope_ than all the ones before.


End file.
